Review of Patriot, an Amazon program where an American spy is tasked on an international mission and messes up at every steps because his depression always comes in the way. An original writing and interesting directing choices makes it a show well worth seeing.

With the release of the season 2 of Patriot (that I have thoroughly binge-watched this weekend), I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about this astonishing program that came well under the radar but is full of awesome ideas. It’s one of the best depictions of depression that I know, and you can’t fail to understand how the character thinks and feels after seeing it.

The story is about John Tavner, an American spy who is tasked by his boss (who is also his father) to give money to help the presidential campaign of an Iranian politician. To do that, he has to get hired under a fake identity in a construction company, and get sent to Luxembourg to meet a man who will in turn bring the money where it needs to go.

But John hate his job, although he can’t quit. Why, you might think? John feels his job is too important to be done wrong, or at least the job is more important than himself, and he has a duty to his father. So he has to do it. And he has to do things that makes him fall every time deeper in depression, especially when he messes up. And he messes up, a lot. Essentially because he is depressed. And nobody notices. NOBODY! Well, until his wife, to whom he can’t say a thing about his job, and his brother, start to see that he isn’t “pretty good”.

One interesting thing about the writing is the atmosphere that gets even more absurd as the story goes. The script doesn’t care about a specific credibility of events. The point is not to make the investigation or the situations realistic, or to have logical dialogues between background characters, but to show that John goes more into madness as he commits crimes. But somehow he retains some form of sanity, he has this drive to see his mission to the end, even if the absurdity of the situation overwhelms him completely. Will he see the light in the darkness? Will his wife come to save him from his mission and his father?

So, if you have some time to kill and a Prime subscription, I would really recommend seeing this series, especially if you like some dark humour. Plus the main actor is incredibly good.

Follow up on my manga review, here I talk about The Bride Was a Boy, by Chii, who tells us how she managed to find a boyfriend and marry him after she was raised as a boy. All the while explaining what a gender transition is.

As mentioned in my previous article, I will be dedicating a full page on The Bride Was a Boy, a Japanese comic book about a transgender woman, Chii (the author) who is finally getting married, despite all the obstacles that she had to overcome to make it possible. Obviously, being a transgender woman, I deeply relate to the author, even though I live in a country where such barriers don’t exist. We’ll get to that in a moment.

At first, I was surprised by the title. “The Bride was a Boy” seemed like a weird way to make people understand that transgender women are women and where not actually boys, and I was genuinely scared that it would just make fun of us. But the author clears that up in the very first page: “The Bride was a Boy” is an oversimplification or, as she says “I was a boy, or at least, I looked like one”, and goes on to describe how her life unfolded from growing up as a boy in the eyes of society.

It is a personal account, and like any other personal account (see my review of First Year Out, by Sabrina Symington), the experience differs greatly from person to person. Chii makes a good case of pointing that out. Which is where her manga isn’t just a nice and funny account of a person’s life,

IT IS A PUBLIC SERVICE!

And I don’t mean it lightly. It’s very rare to read an author who wants to be as inclusive and comprehensive as it can, going beyond their own experience. To go into this, we need to look at the structure of the book. The story is divided in 9 chapters, each talking about a significant period in her life. Some overlap (hormone therapy and legal gender change, for example), but overall, it’s mostly chronological. And where this work isn’t just a life story and becomes actually educational, it’s in the fact that between every chapter, Chii explains a transition step or a an issue that can’t put into images because they are quite complex and she wants to make sure it is well understood by anyone who read it.

And it’s very accurate. Where the comic strips tell her life, the educational texts go into a lot of educational details (1), that are still explained in such a simple way anyone will understand, including, and especially, children. She also acknowledge where she lacks the knowledge to explain further, especially when something differs between countries. The most obvious example is the legal name change. She explains how it’s done in Japan, but she can’t possibly tell how other countries deal with it, since there is no two countries that share the same laws and regulations on the matter. But she explains all the important notions necessary to understand the situation for trans people, and she even cites scientific sources at the end of the book.

Finally, I should talk a bit about the art and the tone in itself, because not only it is a great romance in a super cute style,

IT’S ALSO SUPER FUNNY!

The back cover cracked me up. That’s totally the kind of cute humour the story is full of.

It’s super refreshing. It is a love story that ends well about a transgender woman who gets married with her quirky and funny boyfriend who never at any point doubted she was a woman. Let me say that again.

IT’S A STORY ABOUT A TRANSGENDER WOMAN WHO LIVES A HAPPY LIFE.

And we need that. We need stories where it’s not just about being harassed, assaulted or killed, but where it is possible to actually be happy when and after transitioning. That we can have the same things than any other people, that it’s normal, and that no one comes to take it from us because they don’t like the idea of us.

So, I think you understand now that I totally recommend this book. Read it, give it to your friends and family, because it’s really a comic book for everyone. No question about it. Why are you even still here?

(1) She even go as far as talking about the DSM and the difference between Gender Identity Disorder and Gender Dysphoria, and why now GD is preferred by the scientific society but Japan still uses GID. She also points out that any information regarding medical regulation and laws on gender change are true in 2016 when the book is released but may change later.

Review of two book: Claudine, a 1978 manga about a transgender man facing bullying; and My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, the true account of a young homosexual woman who had to face depression and social expectations.

After I saw a post on twitter about Claudine, a Japanese comic book about a transgender man that was supposedly very good (for its time), I set out to buy it, and added in my shopping cart a couple of other mangas dealing with LGBT issues: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, and The Bride Was a Boy.

So here are the reviews in the reading order.

Claudine, by Ryoko Ikeda:

Claudine is by far the weakest of the three. I was expecting a very powerful art work about trans issues, but instead, I got shallow characters, empty plot and a poor understanding of the subject. Now, it was made in 1978, and it is probably the reflection of the stereotypes of that time, but there are points in this book that make it really not interesting as a story.

And the biggest problem is the main character. He has no other definition than being transgender. We don’t know anything about him. The story is told from the accounts of his psychiatrist who, you’d think would talk about more things than just his struggle with gender identity. But we never know a single thing about Claudine but that she is from a rich family. I think it kills the story entirely, because it is impossible to relate to a character who’s just an empty shell. And the psychiatrist, who is ultimately the voice of the author, kills the whole open-mindedness by saying a very transphobic “Even a true man couldn’t love a woman so utterly” (1).

Then, the plot revolves almost uniquely around a girl who is in love with Claudine and sets out to sabotage every single relationship he (Claudine) has with other girls. And the whole story is like that. Claudine is rather passive. Things happen to her, it’s all about how people react to her, but not much how she reacts. She is like the MacGuffin of her own story.

I can’t really talk about the art form, because I am not used to the manga style, but I was surprised that Claudine was drawn in a very different style than the other characters. Maybe the author wanted him to stand out from the crowd, but for me, it just reinforces the MacGuffin effect, his shallowness, that he is not human, as opposed to all the other characters.

Finally, although there are some good ideas, the book, even by the 70’s standards, this story lacks character development, which was a real turn off to me. I couldn’t see a real person in Claudine, and it was a huge drawback in my opinion.

My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, by Nagata Kabi:

This book is a breath of fresh air. It’s powerful, moving and relatable. It’s not a graphic novel. It’s more like an illustrated essay. Every strip is narrated by the author, who tells her own story. A story of feeling like an outcast, because she doesn’t see herself in the expectations of others. And still she tries to meet these expectations, which drives her to be even more miserable, and not knowing why.

It is a powerful tale of getting to know yourself and the cause of your sickness, instead of finding ways to ignore it or inflicting physical pain to oneself to know why it hurts. It touched so close to home on so many occasion, I wanted to cry during most of the book. It’s quite surely a good read to anyone who faced depression and had a hard time recognising the cause, or to people who never had such an experience but would like to understand how oppressing and terrifying this situation is.

It is well crafted; although it’s a real story, the author makes the effort of giving it a pace and a structure, and every act offers to show a real change in her mindset and relationship with her illness (2) until she understands the cause and ultimately gets better by living the life that suits her, instead of trying to get her parents approval on everything (3). Her illustrations are really doing a good work of explaining how her depression worked and how she was feeling most of the time. I think that even someone who’s never had depression and doesn’t understand the concept can have a pretty good idea at how it must feel for people who are afflicted.

And of course, it’s also a story of a lesbian woman in a country that is still very conservative on sexuality, and who ultimately tries to be herself despite social barriers. Just read it people.

The Bride Was a Boy, by Chii:

I have a lot to say about this one, so here is a page dedicated to this review.

(1) Let’s hope it’s a translation mistake, which is totally possible, seeing how disastrous the translation is. Full of typos, grammar errors, inconsistencies, I had to read some lines several times to make sure I understood.

(2) I shouldn’t have to explain that, but in case anyone misinterpret what I wrote: her illness is not her homosexuality, obviously. It’s the depression that comes from the inability to recognise that she is homosexual and trying to fit into societal expectations.

(3) Yes, I’m spoiling the end, but that was that or killing herself. So since she is writing this book, we can only assume it’s not really a surprise. The whole point of the story is to see how she navigates her depression and heals.

Why I think dialogues in films are not as important as people may want to believe. Cinema is mainly a visual media, let’s focus more on the image and what it can tell.

When I was living in Vancouver, my flatmate was watching about everything with subtitles, even though everything he was watching was in English, which is his mother tongue. He mainly did that because of a combination of problems: the annoyingly poorly balanced sound tracks in movies (speech too low vs sound effects too loud) and the fact that our house was next to a very busy road. In the end, it was pretty much impossible to understand a film without subtitles, and I had to do it too, although I really don’t like it.

See, a few years ago, I had this talk with a friend who couldn’t watch an English-speaking film without subtitle, not because he couldn’t understand English well (he was pretty good at it actually), but because he couldn’t accept to watch a film and not understand 100% of dialogues. I understand his point, but I sadly think it’s a way too common belief that speech is more important than image in movie.

For my part, I started watching English-speaking films without subtitles in the early 2000’s. Back then, it was about improving my English listening skills. If I wasn’t reading, I was more focused on the speech, and therefore more akin to understand what actors were saying and get used to the language. Long story short, it really helped a lot (1). But as I got better at understanding English, well, there was no point in putting back subtitles anymore.

And I remembered what my Mom was saying about her never watching movies with subtitles. She doesn’t watch film in English, she watches the French-dubbed versions. But she made a very good point at not reading subtitle: “I can’t focus on both the image and the subtitles”. And I think that’s the whole point.

Now, my Mom is not a cinephile. She just enjoys a movie every now and then. But it’s true for everyone. Cinema is mainly a visual media. For years, films could even tell a story without a single line of dialogue, because there wasn’t sound on it yet. So filmmakers used a lot of visual cues to convey various plots and emotions, because it wasn’t possible to break the film pace every five seconds with dialogue screens.

So now, we have countless ways to tell a story visually but still, a lot of people don’t realise it. If it’s not in dialogue, it’s like it’s not explained at all. That’s pretty much why fool-proofed movies tend to over-explain the plot in dialogues even though everything is quite always obvious in context. Just look at how hardly-audible dialogues in Interstellar were perceived by a large part of the audience. Another great example is when Mel Gibson wanted to screen The Passion without subtitles, which would have been a great idea, since the audience most likely to go watch the film already knew the story and how it ends (spoiler: Jesus dies on a cross). But of course, this didn’t happen, because the film would have completely flopped at the box office.

People take for granted that every single bit of dialogue must be understandable, when image and sound design are equally or more important to understand the film. When I see movies that try to be visually clever, instead of using trendy shots, get trashed because they are too contemplative/hardly understandable/pretentious/boring (check the appropriate answer for your case), it really explains why there are much less films like that anymore, and also why I don’t watch that many films anymore. (2)

When you focus too much on dialogues, and therefore on subtitles, it’s the same amount of attention you don’t give to image and sound (4), and so you lose way more information than you think you get by being overly attentive to dialogues. I always feel that when I tell people I don’t watch films with subtitles, they think I’m being pretentious. I’m not. I maybe understand give or take 90% of dialogues in any given film (even in French-speaking films, there are always mumbled or covered lines that are hardly understandable), but I just enjoy and understand the movies better if I’m not distracted by subtitles. Once I even watched a movie in a language I didn’t know at all and I understood the plot.

Of course I wouldn’t recommend to watch an entire movie without subtitle if you don’t understand the language, especially the ones that have really well-crafted dialogues (Tarantino’s films, for example, are enjoyable because of dialogues). But if you understand at least 60% (rule of thumb here), I feel like it’s worth giving it a shot.

So, I hate to admit, but turns out my Mom was right all along.

(1) In the same way, watching Japanese animation with English subtitles has helped my English-reading skills a lot. If you want to learn some language, these are actually very good exercises to consolidate your knowledge. But you need some level of proficiency first.

(2) And still, in the end, they are the films that get to be remembered and studied in schools.

(3) And don’t get me started on multitasking. There is no such thing. It’s actually task switching. And in case of subtitles, you have to move your gaze to the text, so you can’t in any way watch the image and the subtitles at the same time, especially in theatre (we can talk about the 2° field of view for accurate vision later).

(4) Obviously I don’t recommend it. I was just curious about a particular film and couldn’t find the subtitles. I lost a lot of information in the process, but I still enjoyed watching the film.

Sometimes a dream takes you somewhere you wouldn’t have expected. This is a story of a girl who was deeply moved by her saddest dream ever.

She can do what she wants. Until a few days ago, she was still working full time so that one day, she could retire and spend her final days in peace and harmony. What a dream. But she never wanted that, did she. Looks like life took care of it for her. This very morning she went to her office and handed off her resignation letter. Now she is free of any engagement. She can do everything she ever wanted to do, planning for the future doesn’t mean anything to her anymore.

Right now she is diving in euphoria. She has so many things she wants to do. But so little time. She is sitting on the grass in a downtown park, reading a book she’s been months on since it’s pretty boring but she doesn’t want to give it up until she reaches the end. And she’s expecting him.

[…]

Sitting next to her, he realises her light and cheery attitude is fading away. She didn’t tell him why she was such in a good mood, but he now knows everything she plans to do, and he is not sure if he should support her no questions asked. She starts shivering.

[…]

She said it. It is weird to say it out loud. “It’s only when you say it that it becomes real”. She doesn’t know where she heard that but it doesn’t matter. She starts crying. Her head falls heavy on his shoulder. The pain outweighs the euphoria. It is still there, inside of her, hidden behind a mountain of sadness. The sadness will erode, she knows it. But right now, she has to take it in, feel every part of it. Only after she accepts her inescapable fate will she be able to live her short life to the fullest.

[…]

She opens her eyes, They’re wet from the tears she shed during the night. She doesn’t move. Just lying there, she tries to understand what has just happened, and why this dream felt so real. Her first reaction is to regret she isn’t really living that dream. She wished she could have a good reason to leave her work and do whatever she wants. She knows it is a sad story that would end in a dramatic way, but she’d rather have that than an eventless life of struggling and being tired all the time.

[…]

She takes her breakfast, but it’s difficult. She has to go through the motion. Her livelihood depends on it. But it’s hard. Still she drinks her apple juice and gets ready for the day.

[…]

It’s the middle of the afternoon. She was too tired to go on with her work, so she sat on the living room sofa and started strumming chords on her guitar. The dream is still in her head. She realises it’s the first time a feeling from a dream sticks with her for such a long time, but she doesn’t know how to process it.

[…]

Several days have passed. She is playing her guitar absentmindedly while watching a film. The credits are rolling. She is lying on the sofa with the guitar laid her chest, and her eyes are stuck on the screen.

She sits up, put some stupid but funny show on the TV. Then she opens the laptop on the coffee table and starts writing this piece.

What do people mean when they say they “identify” with a character? I argue that most of a time, it’s empathy, and identification comes with customisation, but I may be wrong, hey!

I had this very interesting conversation with a friend over the announcements around Cyberpunk 2077 at E3. CD Project Red (the developer and editor) said that the game will be played in first person because it makes the game more immersive, or personal (1), and also because it was necessary due to the augmentations. So I assume that, like in Deux Ex, visual implants have an impact on how you see the world, and therefore makes it necessary to see through the character’s eyes.

But in my opinion (2), it is also helps a lot to feel like you’re the character. To identify. I think the word “Identification” have been used for about anything that goes beyond its meaning. When you talk about your identity, it’s something that’s in you, in your own personality, so you can’t identify to everything just because the story is well told or the character is well crafted. That’s where empathy comes in. When your best friend tells you about something very sad that happens to them, and as a result, you feel sad too, it’s because of your empathy for that person. You know them and you understand what they’re going through, so you end up feeling the same way as they do. But you don’t suddenly identify to them just because you feel sad when they tell you about their sad story.

And I really think it’s the same thing for any work of fiction. When you watch a film and you feel all that’s happening to a character, you don’t say at the end of a film “Oh my god! I was Tony Stark for 2 hours and a half”. You’ll be more likely to say something along the line of “Wow, Me too I’d feel devastated if I realised I could have stopped Starlord before he did anything stupid” (3). And it’s no different in video games.

Obviously, we’re restricting the topic to games that put you in control of a single character that is identified and has a background. In this kind of games, most of the time you follow a character that has a pre-defined background and you don’t get much freedom to shape the character. Games like Uncharted, The Last of Us or Tomb Raider fall in that category. You can often choose the skills you want to develop, but ultimately, the story goes in one direction, and you have no other choice but to be passive in the light of what happens to the character. It’s a developer’s choice, when they want to tell a story but don’t want you to mess with the storyline while still having fun. And in many of those games, you play in third person. Meaning that the “camera” is positioned behind the character and lets you swing around. It’s usually a good way to see the character and/in the environment, and apparently it’s something that players love, seeing how they disagreed with CD Projekt Red’s decision to have Cyberpunk 2077 played in first person.

But it’s not always the case. For example, Deus Ex is played in first person, probably for the reason stated above, but the character is defined by the developer with development limited to skills. And in the other hand, Mass Effect lets you customise your character entirely (which includes the background to some extent), but is played in third person. At the very extreme, every competitive shooter (Overwatch, Rainbow 6: Siege or, my personal favourite, Insurgency) is played in first person and we couldn’t care less about the characters (4).

So, despite what I told my friend this morning, I don’t think the choice of a first or third person depends on the degree of identification. It’s mostly down to what the developer wants to focus on in terms of immersive experience and gameplay or what audience they’re aiming at. I still think that having the camera behind the character puts a barrier, but it’s a very personal feeling. Which is weird, because I never had any problem identifying with the characters I created for Fallout 1 and 2 (pictured below).

And that’s were I think the difference lies: in the degree of customisation. A character will be more like you (and therefore identifyable) if you made it like you. Or if you made it like you’d wish to be. With my psychologist in France, we used to talk about how character customisation may help understand how we identified. Specifically, when I talked about video games, I told her that when I was creating a character from scratch, most of the time, the gender I chose didn’t have any consequence in the character arc (5). That’s when she pointed out that if I can craft out my character the way I want, even though there won’t be any consequences (6), then it reinforces the identification with the character, because the character will be even closer to who I am, or who I want to be. And (in my case at least), it was totally right; I always made a female character because I couldn’t identify with a male character, even before I accepted the fact that I was transgender. If the way you customise your character didn’t matter in the game, why would you do it? In the end, it’s a way to let the player feel more like they’re into the game and identify with the character. But really identify, in the sense that you are the character. How you would react in the same situation, not just experiencing their story?

To conclude, I obviously don’t think people bullshit when they say they identify to a character. I am just saying that what they’re actually experiencing is empathy, but they can truly identify only when they have the opportunity to shape the character the way they want. But of course, when I’m in a conversation, I’ll still talk about identification, because I’m not a pretentious asshole who think she is better than every one else (7).

(1) “The first-person point of view is there so you can see things happening up close, and so you can really interact with things in a visceral manner. with the game world.” http://ca.ign.com/articles/2018/06/12/e3-2018-cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-addresses-first-person-backlash

(2) And I really want to stress that it’s a personal opinion, I am not trying to impose it on anyone, just to have a discussion about it.

(3) It’s not a spoiler, I didn’t say that Spiderman dies.

(4) Overwatch and Rainbow 6: Siege made backgrounds for their characters but even though a player may choose a character considering their background, they only use the character’s skill set in game. The point is to win the game, not chitchat about the character’s narrative.

(5) Except a few cases like the first 2 Fallout, where each gender has some different but symmetrical effect. For example, a woman’s charisma will work better on someone attracted to women.

(6) And even when it does, I usually stick to a character that feels more like me. For example, when the game encourages making a strong fighter, I keep making a clever one and skip the strength attribute, because I prefer getting away with a clever word than a bullet in the face, even though it’s more challenging.

Sometimes, you want to talk about a film that hasn’t been released yet, because you put a lot of faith in it. So in this post, I will be talking about Girl, by Lukas Dhont, and why it is important to me that it doesn’t disappoint.

It’s that time in the year when people rush to the South of France to watch tons of films that won’t be released before 6 months. Well, tons of privileged people, since the Cannes Film Festival is the only festival in the world that doesn’t accept self-paying visitors. Nevermind that, there are still very interesting films being shown there, and even though I can’t attend (never been even once), I still follow what’s happening, thanks to Alicia Malone‘s tweetline (1).

And one of her tweets particularly caught my eye:

GIRL: a very impressive debut from Lukas Dhont, about a young trans girl who wants to be a ballerina. Of course I can’t speak to the authenticity of the trans experience (& actor is cis) but on an emotional level the film is extremely effective. Take tissues #Cannes2018pic.twitter.com/1jnehEf6D6

Obviously (if you know enough about me), I was instantly interested about this film, Girl, directed by Lukas Dhont, and apparently, the French newspaper LeMonde also saw the film and gave their few cents on it. And now I am totally hooked. I know I have to wait until October to watch it in theatre, and I don’t usually review a prospect of a film, but there is a good reason I am hopeful: this is not a movie about transphobia (2). Most movie about transgender people deal with the hardship of being transgender because of other people being total assholes. This film is different. There is no debate about transgender people. We exist, it’s a fact, and in this story, every one is accepting of the trans girl. The family is loving, everybody is willing to help or at least they behave around her like she’s a totally normal girl.

The hardship is elsewhere. It’s internal. Even though people offer their help and support, we can’t move onward if we don’t acknowledge that this help is honest. It is best shown in this snippet of the movie:

At some point, the psychiatrist asks “Do you believe I see a woman when I look at you?” And he has to pull the answer out of her mouth. “No”. She says it so timidly. And for a good reason. It’s hard to tell someone you don’t believe them when they show the much needed support. And if we don’t believe it, it’s because we don’t see it ourselves. Therefore it seems impossible that other people see something about us that we only dreamt of for so long.

To me, it touches so close to home. I moved to Canada in January 2017, introducing to everyone as Élise, but people I was meeting randomly would obviously not see me as a woman. It took months of hormone therapy (I started in May 2017) and laser beard removal (since September 2016) before I could see any significant change. Since I never really enjoyed doing make-up that much or dressing overly feminine or girly, it didn’t help to be gendered correctly on a regular basis. That took time, and I saw it happen, first occasionally, then more frequently, until this month. Now It happens every single time. It downed on me last week in a bar where a group of guys on a bachelor party didn’t think twice about my gender. One even did a really corny move in my back, thinking I didn’t see. I can’t tell if they knew I was transgender, but if they did, they surely hid it very well.

But the switch really happened this weekend. I went with a friend to look at swimsuits. I haven’t done any scuba diving for 3 years and I miss it so much it drives me crazy. I had to go to the store, to build up the courage (wearing a push-up bra helped too). When I arrived at the swimwear corner, the saleswoman instantly greeted me with a “Madam” and asked me what I was looking for, and offered me to try some on. I switched. I stopped being afraid.

It was like learning a new language. You struggle for a long time with the idea that you’ll ever be able to speak fluently. And one day, it just happens. You feel it inside of you. You’re thinking in your new language and people understand when you speak. It’s what happened to me that day. I knew I was passing. Maybe not 100%. Maybe not if I stay in a conversation for such a long time that people get from the way I speak and behave that I’m trans, but it doesn’t matter. People gender me correctly at the introduction, and that’s 99% of the work.

For a long time, I felt like this young dancer in Girl. I couldn’t see what people were seeing. But now I can, and it’s such a wonderful feeling. I may be scared again, occasionally, but I know that most of the time, I can do it confidently.

On a side note, I love the interaction between the father and the daughter in this clip, it sounds so realistic:

(2) And I don’t mean film about transphobia are not interesting. They are, and they need to exist, at least as long as transphobia is a thing. But I wish we could have transgender characters in movies where they’re not here just to talk about transphobia. There are trans people out there living − almost − normal lives. Please talk about them or include them in your stories like it’s normal. That’s what we need. On this note, if you haven’t yet, you should definitely watch A Fantastic Woman (La Mujer Fantastica, by Sebastian Lelio).